Poetry in Auroville: Abha Prakash

Abha grew up in Delhi and graduated in Canada. She joined Auroville in 2002, and lives in Utilite, with her husband and their two children. She is a IGSCE/GCE teacher of English at Future School since 2003. Abha views her poetic pieces as extensions of her inner and social self, rooted in her personal space and time. Apart from poetry, she also likes to write memoir.

Selected Poems

Oversized
Bob the Builders roar in the greenbeltTear out
trees, bushes, even the nettlesThat
goats love to eat.

The
forest dwindles, bird nests fall to the ground.The red
paths widen, the sun reddens open wounds.Where
have all the trees gone? Look, the canyons are disappearing.

The
yellow bulldozers no longer entice my three year old.He
watches them heave great mouthfuls of red earth and spew them out in
ugly bundsThe
leveling is terrible; the undulating beauty of Auroville is gone.

We walk
now through rectangular fields, locked in their grid, right-angled by
destruction. The old winding paths and creaking palmyra no longer
exist.The old
map of Auroville is redrawn.

(On
the destruction of the Utility canyon, April 2007)

Auroville child

Birdsounds glide into his mindAnd then escape, leaving little notes behind.He chants an alphabet,A baby babble, a bird songThat stirs the whiskers of the sleeping cat.

Along the dusty path, he picks up old goat droppings,black beads too conspicuous to ignore.Feels their oval plumpnesscaress his little fingers.He smiles. His way of mappingthis world is not mine.

(Auroville, 2005)

Samadhi

Devotees, scores of them,circle the flowered mound, smooth the marbleedges of their soul, then settle like silent Buddhas,along the verandah, under the tree on the rough brick floor.Glances float up to your window,Then glide down.Leaves fall like so many prayersfretful in the shade.

Men and women in white move,or stand still like fragile gateposts.Order beckons here with just a simple look,a wave of the hand.A measure of calm comes,quietly questioning.Can the flowers bear the touch?Do your eyes still wander through the green?

(Pondicherry , 1998)

High time I quit

A
sabbatical is what I need.Catty
looks, arching eyebrows, feigned inattentiveness, mind games, ego
hassle—It’s
time to retreat from the teenage mutants — from the Monday morning
wrecks,Thursday
afternoon zombies, Friday party planners —I
wish for a normal workplace, humans with normal hormones.How
about sweeping off those anarchic assignments piled up high, and
making space for my dwindling weekends?I
have to stop entertaining myself with lexical jokes — faulty
agreements, the lose-loose connections, quite-quiet mischoices —
that colour the high school world.For
all their I-can-do-Dubliners-in-2-weeks, the essays hover far from
insight and legibility.But
I cannot abandon them, of course.The
long faces, droopy eyes, make me slave under mistaken notions.I
lead them to the exams, correct the mocks for the tenth time.They
graduate. A virtual hello comes now and then to revive my fainting
resolve.**************I
begin again, yet again. I smile, not too widely, and welcome the
fresh faces, their youthful joy, and eagerness to be in the A-level
English class.Surely
this new group can be motivated to indulge in speech analysis and
explore the Joycean voice.I
alternate leniency with law and order. They accept the new rules for
a month or two, sit relatively straight, open their mouths
meaningfully.And
then the sluggish August afternoons, the lone plaintive calls of the
peacocks take over. Eyes glaze; there is time for reveries, doodling,
mockingthe
sincere ones who labour diligently . . until the finishing line.

Vision

The first and lowest use of Art is the purely aesthetic, the second is the intellectual or educative, the third and highest the spiritual.